Unlocking Hidden Value with Software Asset Management

[0:00] Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Welcome to today’s session: Unlocking Hidden Value with Software Asset Management. I’m Nix, your host for this webinar. In the next 20 minutes, we’ll explore how shifting the view of software from a cost centre to a business asset can help your organisation unlock new value. You’ll hear how usage analytics and smarter license strategies can align software spend with real business outcomes, leading to greater efficiency, clarity, and ROI. Feel free to send in your questions using the Q&A panel at the top of your screen. We’ll cover as many as we can live and follow up after the session if needed.

[0:44] Now, let’s meet our speakers for today. From Open IT, David brings 25 years of leadership experience from ConocoPhillips and BP, with deep expertise in digital product strategy, asset optimisation, and aligning technology with business outcomes. From Optimal, Finley has a background in IT systems and marketing with a strong focus on software asset management. He brings a solution-focused approach to helping clients turn digital challenges into measurable business results. Let’s welcome David and Finley.

[1:14] David: Lovely, thank you very much, Nix. Great to be here — and great to be here with Finley. I’ve done a few of these webinars and I’m usually on my own, so doing them together is kind of fun. This is actually Finley’s second webinar of the day. We’re speaking to you from Scotland, where we both live, and it’s a beautiful sunny day outside — it’s a bit of a shame we can’t do it from outside, but here we are. So, what are we going to talk about? We’re going to go through a little bit about what our respective companies provide — Finley on Optimal, and I’ll talk a little bit about Open IT and how that fits into their overall offering. Then we’ll get into what the real advantage is of having those two things together: why it makes sense to have software asset management as part of an overall wider asset management strategy or programme. And then a little bit about some of the inertia — or resistance — to the more proactive parts of software asset management. We’ll go through some of that as well, then a bit of a conclusion and some questions, which hopefully will come up too. So let’s get going. I’ll hand over to Finley just to talk a little bit about Optimal, and then I’ll chip in about Open IT.

[2:43] Finley: Fantastic. Thank you, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Hopefully my accent isn’t too strong — if you need subtitles, just pop a message in the chat and we’ll get to it later on. So some of you might already be familiar with Optimal, but I’ll just briefly go through who we are and what we do. We are Optimal — we simplify the complexities of asset management, allowing our clients to focus on what matters most: achieving their mission. Our expertise spans many aspects and industries — oil and gas, engineering, power generation, manufacturing, utilities, nuclear, and more. Whether it’s asset reliability, maintenance planning, or intelligent asset management, we’re here to support you on your journey. We have an office in Aberdeen, Scotland — where we are currently, and where it is nice and sunny today. All it takes is a little bit of sun and Scotland is suddenly beautiful. We also have offices in Johannesburg, South Africa, and projects in other parts of the world as well.

[4:03] So I’ll just go through the four main areas of our work and how we help support people. The first is operational readiness — having the staff, processes, and systems in place to safely and efficiently begin or sustain operations without disruption. This includes asset reliability, asset inspection, and asset maintenance strategy. The second is operations and maintenance — having the tools to efficiently execute maintenance and operational activities from day one, helping to avoid unplanned downtime and keeping projects on track, because unplanned maintenance can set you back weeks or even months. You may have heard of Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, and operations management and maintenance planning. The third is digital engineering, which ties in with Open IT — optimisation, design, delivery, and life cycle management of complex systems from the outset. This includes Computerised Maintenance Management Systems, or CMMS, Asset Performance Management, or APM, and intelligent asset management. And lastly, advisory and optimisation — this is broader in scope: aligning strategy, processes, and performance insights to ensure you’re making informed decisions and continuously improving your operational outcomes, making everything as efficient as possible. This relates to asset strategy development, asset management policy, and asset criticality analysis.

[5:48] A little bit more about us. Our philosophy is all about making projects easier — taking control of software and hardware, and using the experience we have across many different types of equipment and tools to take a proactive approach to maintenance rather than a reactive one. A reactive approach is more traditional: you wait for something to break and then you fix it. A proactive approach uses experience, failure causes, and failure modes to get ahead of maintenance so you know it’s coming and you have your spares and everything in place to make it as efficient as possible. We support you through every aspect of a project — all the way from planning to decommissioning, cradle to grave as we call it. And in terms of asset management, we were more focused on traditional physical assets, but we’ve come to see software as an asset too — which is why we’re here.

[6:56] So, what is software as an asset? Some of you may know it as software asset management. Software has generally always been seen as a sunk cost — a necessary tool. But at Optimal and Open IT, we treat it as a valuable business asset. This includes applications, licences, usage data, and documentation. And just like hardware, software can be strategically managed across its life cycle from acquisition to retirement. Why does this matter? Treating software as an asset allows us to help organisations reduce costs, improve IT efficiency and security, strengthen compliance, and unlock long-term value. We typically see savings of around 20 to 30%, though it really depends on the business, its scale, and the specifics of each case.

[7:55] The key benefits — just reiterating what we’ve covered — are cost reduction: eliminate unused licences and invest those savings elsewhere, whether that’s taking on new personnel or investing in new equipment. It can make a real difference if you’re spending tens or hundreds of thousands on software and you achieve a 10 or 20% saving, which just unleashes new potential for your business. Risk mitigation: stay compliant with vendor terms, which can be quite strict and carry consequences if you fail to meet them. Operational efficiency: right-size software to actual needs — having clarity and an overview of exactly what’s going on in your business, and being able to take steps to make it more efficient and look for opportunities. And strategic planning: forecast future needs accurately, understand your monthly, quarterly, and annual usage, look at peak times, and make sure your actual usage aligns with your strategy.

[9:02] David: I’ll take it from here. And I like that — “right-size software to actual needs” — that’s a key one, and I think it’s one of the things we’ll focus on. Finley covered a lot of the why, and I suppose Open IT provides the how. But just a little bit about the who — who in an organisation cares about this, who is responsible for software assets? Often, you’ve got the business setting the strategy or doing the real work, you’ve got the finance constraints and the planning, and then you’ve got IT, which the software needs to run on. The groups that typically worry about software asset management sit between those corners of that triangle — they’re the ones who are responsible. They may not necessarily have the authority or hold the budget, but there will be people or teams responsible for delivering a good asset management strategy. And those are the points in the organisation where I think Open IT is most valuable — it can really empower them in their work.

[10:20] Because when you’re looking at software products and you want to optimise them, you have a process: you find out what you’re going to need to spend, you monitor your licences, you check whether you have denials, whether users are unable to do what they need to do, whether you have too much capacity, who is using them, who your top users are — and then you need to agree on a path forward, seek approval, and ask questions like: who should be using this, is there an alternative? All of those key questions are part of an overall business engagement strategy that is underpinned by good data — and Open IT helps you with a big chunk of that workflow by giving you the data you need to make decisions.

[11:10] So on a more practical level, what is Open IT and what does it deliver? The most foundational part — Level 1 — is looking at your runtime: licence servers, check-ins and checkouts, who is checking those licences out and for how long, usage patterns, denials. It gives you the most basic but essential information and summarises it at both application level and modular level. On top of that, we can enable an agent on desktops or cloud platforms — Open IT doesn’t really care where the software runs in terms of platform. That gives you true active use: it looks at mouse, keyboard, and CPU usage to tell you not just whether someone has a licence checked out, but whether they’re truly using it. And then, where the software merits it — and we’re typically talking here about high-value engineering software in industries like manufacturing, oil and gas, aerospace, automotive, and mining, where expensive specialist applications are being used by expert users — where the value is high, licence reclaiming through a managed service becomes appropriate. If licences are not being effectively used at a given moment, you can bring them back into the pool and redistribute them to other users.

[13:05] So really, Open IT gives you the answers you need: who is using an application, who is using it right now, who has used it in the past, how long, where do they sit, what is the detail of their usage, do you have idle time, can you reclaim licences? It’s all about giving flexibility and freedom. You can view Open IT data through its web-based interface for reports and heat maps, or you can export data to any number of industry-standard tools — Excel, Tableau, Spotfire, Power BI. Power BI is particularly powerful for harnessing Open IT data alongside all your other data, making it easier for anyone in the organisation to use.

[13:56] This is kind of what it looks like — a web-based interface where you can see real-time use: who is using which applications right now, and which machine they are logged in from. That last point — what machine they are logged in from — is something we’ll probably come back to when talking about a combined asset management strategy: not just who is running the software, but where they’re running it. It also gives you a historical usage rundown over a selected time period, lets you see your opportunities — whether you’re hitting your high-watermark, whether your actual usage is approaching your legal entitlements, or whether there’s a gap in between.

[14:36] A heat map is also very valuable because you can see the key times — of the year, the month, or the day — when your usage peaks. Are you appropriately licenced? Are you over-licenced? Or are you only hitting a high point for a very small amount of time through the year? Typically, we see usage peaks in spring and September, but understanding your usage pattern is very important for your overall strategy and how it ties into your asset management approach. Open IT does that very well.

[15:13] Financial analysis is also very important — you want to know what you’re spending and you want to tie those software assets to your costs. This is actually a Power BI dashboard for Autodesk, just as an example, and that’s for a tokenised or named-user system. Open IT can handle many different licensing systems. But in a situation like this, you want to know your run rate: what is your current usage, what is your forecast, what is your budget going to be? In that triangle, you want to be reporting back to your financial officer with clear, good information. The visual aspect helps catch things that a spreadsheet might not — on a spreadsheet, it just seems okay, so you carry on. Whereas visually, the picture tells a different story.

[16:13] Finley: And you were telling me about invoices just getting paid without being queried at all.

[16:20] David: Yes, exactly. The example I was referring to was a large organisation we were working with where an invoice was being paid for a piece of software that had, at one time, played a very pivotal role in a workflow. It was actually an enabling piece of software sitting between two large systems. But what had happened was that it had mostly become obsolete with the move to cloud computing — it was more relevant in an on-premises-only environment, where applications needed to convert data to a database. With the move to cloud, it became obsolete. But nobody had ever checked whether it was still being used. And it became very clear, very quickly, that this software was obsolete — yet it had been paid for for a good few years with nobody using it. Having good analytics meant you could make a change immediately. That clarity gives you the ability to make those decisions because all the information is right there in front of you.

[17:34] Finley: And that was not quite a seven-figure saving, but it wasn’t far off at all.

[17:43] David: So what is it you’re really trying to achieve? Your software entitlements — what you’ve installed or what you’re paying for — will be at a particular level. But with these different techniques, you want to look at what your actual true usage is. It’s that gap between what you’re paying for or what you’re entitled to, and what you’re actually using. The aim of Open IT data is to bring those two into line — what you’re paying for and what you’re entitled to needs to match what you’re actually using.

[18:22] So that’s Open IT in a nutshell — I didn’t go into a lot of technical detail, but if anyone wants to know more, please do reach out. Now, what does it mean to have Open IT usage data as part of an overall asset management strategy — the kind of services Optimal provide? I think the two are symbiotically linked. Having worked in IT for a long time, it’s easy to provide infrastructure without really understanding what’s running on it and what benefit you’re getting. Understanding what your infrastructure is doing is important. Knowing your hierarchy of dependency is key: if a user is running extensive software, what assets are they using it on, what databases, what infrastructure? And when you think about full cost of ownership within a wider asset management system — how many support tickets are being generated, what kind of support is required, what security concerns do you have — all of that plays into your decision about how to optimise and plan for those assets. It really makes a lot of sense to have Open IT as part of the asset management jigsaw, alongside the wider picture that Optimal represents.

[20:16] Okay, I’ll pass back to you, Finley, to pose the questions about why organisations sometimes see resistance to proactive software asset management — and change in general, especially when people have been there for years and are set in their ways.

[20:41] Finley: There’s certainly a lot of potential when it comes to software asset management, but there are some common blockers that we hear. The first is: “I already spend so much on software — I don’t want to spend extra on new software to manage my other software.” How would you respond to that, David?

[21:27] David: Ultimately, using a tool like Open IT is going to reduce your software costs and reduce your complexity. With the right data behind you, the change is nowhere near as scary. You can demonstrate that yes, it’s adding a small piece of software, but the result is reducing a lot of software. And you always go after the easiest opportunities first — your most expensive software and whichever contracts are coming up for renegotiation soonest. Those are the two things. You might have some really expensive software, but if contractually you can’t renegotiate for 18 months, you put it to one side and go for the next one on the list. So understanding your contractual situation is really important. And ultimately, it doesn’t take much for the tool to pay for itself and then make a profit on top — compared to the cost of the software it’s saving, it’s negligible. In these engineering spaces, like oil and gas, some of those software costs can be pretty eye-watering.

[23:06] Finley: The second blocker is inertia — it’s just easier to keep things the way they are. “We’ve done it this way for however many years. Why change?”

[23:18] David: And I think the example of the tool being paid for year after year is the absolute illustration of why staying still is, in fact, going backwards. Being empowered by good data makes it much easier to break down those barriers. Lack of clear data is what pushes people not to step out of their comfort zone. And as Finley said, we’re only talking about training a small number of staff — it’s not the entire company that has to learn a new way of doing things. You can automate a lot of the processes, and it gives you the clarity to ask: does the usage actually justify what we’re spending on software?

[24:39] Finley: The third blocker is: “We have all these users — we need this many licences for them.” Simple on the surface, but there’s definitely some nuance to it.

[24:53] David: Yes, and it’s understandable. If you’re a stressed engineer with deadlines — you’re working on a drilling project, you’ve got to deliver results — you don’t want anyone questioning your tools. “I need it all, don’t question me.” And it’s understandable, perhaps because they’ve had a bad experience in the past. But that’s the top of the triangle — those are the people producing the value and driving the organisation forward. If they can fully understand what it is they’re using, it becomes much much easier. And sometimes it can be difficult to identify the right person to make those decisions. But what this kind of data often shows is that business management might think their tools are being used in one way, and if you can show them the reality — well, actually, these petroleum engineers or geologists or aerospace engineers are doing something different from what you thought — that opens up questions, which allow you to make decisions together and move forward. For example, you might find that supporting users — data management people, for instance — are tying up expensive software licences when they only really need the base licence. They don’t need all the functionality your top users require. So you can have a strategy where licences specific to support roles don’t include all that functionality. Providing that information to business leaders allows them to be less defensive, because you can show them they’ll still have everything they need — it’s just going to be more efficient. And it catches irregularities too — like that obsolete software. They might have just been used to having 15 licences for something that nobody uses anymore, and until you have that clarity, you simply don’t realise.

[27:18] Finley: And lastly — we don’t want to upset our users. That’s a very common one. This is particularly prevalent when we talk about licence harvesting, or proactive licence management, where your usage data shows a lot of inactive time and you want to bring those licences back into the pool. When you first broach that — “we’re going to reduce the number of active licences, and unused licences are going back into the pool to be redistributed when needed” — people can be defensive. It feels like a tough thing to sell.

[28:04] David: However, what we have found — having gone through this process with many different organisations — is that once proactive licence harvesting and licence control is in place, users actually feel empowered. They’re safe in the knowledge that they’re being good citizens. They can load all their applications, open all their consoles, load all their data — but if they go to a meeting, or need to do something else, or let the dog out, their licence is simply returned to the pool. And it’s quite flexible too: you can set the criteria, including the inactivity period. On the low end, half an hour is not uncommon; typically two hours is reasonable, or even four hours — that’s a morning or an afternoon. There’s a lot of flexibility. And in reality, this doesn’t upset users. The biggest compliment I’ve seen is when you ask users what they think of licence harvesting and they say, “I don’t care — it’s not a bother to me, I can do my job.” And that’s really the best compliment you can get.

[29:33] David: So, thank you, Finley — I enjoyed tackling those. In summary: IT asset management is foundational, and combining good data with good software asset management is where the real value lies. When you look at software asset management and the wider world of asset management together, the result is more than the sum of its parts. Understanding full cost of ownership, dependencies, and putting good information in the right context for business leaders can really overcome a lot of inertia and allow you to make meaningful changes and efficiencies. I’d say there’s a reason why large, successful companies use these strategies — it works. The best way to know if something works is to look at what the biggest players are doing.

[30:39] Nix: Yes, thank you, David and Finley, for those insights — plenty of practical ideas from your presentation. We only have time for one question in this webinar, and we’ll be sure to follow up on the others after the session. The question we have is: what is a typical ROI we see in a process like this?

[31:23] David: Excellent — and that is exactly the right question to ask. You can look at it in a number of ways. I think if you go with a strategy of targeting your biggest costs first, combined with your closest contract renegotiation window — assuming you don’t immediately spot something like software that nobody is using and can cross off the list right away — getting a 20 to 30% ROI is realistic. It’s something we often see, particularly where a portfolio has been in place for a while but hasn’t been proactively managed or had its usage monitored. That would be my answer.

[32:18] Nix: Great. Thank you, David. That concludes our Q&A for this session. Before we wrap up, a quick reminder: this webinar was recorded and you’ll receive a link to the replay in your inbox shortly. You’ll also find it on our webinars on-demand page at openit.com. Alongside the webinar recording, you’ll find a link to our survey — please send us your feedback and any topics you’d like us to cover. Simply scan the QR code on your screen to access both the recording and the survey. Contact us with the details on your screen, and don’t forget to follow us at Open IT Inc. on social media for more insights and updates. If you’d like to connect with Finley or learn more about Optimal, the details are here as well — they are a trusted partner in simplifying asset management and unlocking value from technology. Once again, I’m Nix. Thank you for spending time with us today. We’ll see you at the next webinar.

[33:09] David & Finley: Thank you. Thank you, Nix.